To paraphrase the old David Spade Saturday Night Live bit: I liked this movie better the first time I saw it, when it was called 16 Blocks. (Look it up.) In this jingoistic rah-rah-’Murica guns-guns-guns! dung heap from director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg, Marky and cohorts must escort a highly valuable human asset 22 miles through an unnamed southeast Asian country. (These chickenshit chicken hawk filmmakers don’t even have the balls to name it.) Other very bad things: Wahlberg’s attempts at acting like a smart person; on screen, he looks like he learned English three minutes before cameras rolled. The jokes fall flat (spot the homage to the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark); John Malkovich, who’s been bald since at least 1988, wears a distracting hairpiece; Ronda Rousey, who doesn’t brush her teeth convincingly on screen here, shoots guns but has zero fight scenes; fisticuffs in a tenement building, featuring Iko Uwais of The Raid: Redemption, are dull; and the ending is a flashback, a flash-forward or something else entirely. In any event, it makes no sense.
ByDavid Riedel